Affiliation: I am an Assistant Professor in Political Science, at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and also part of the Graduate Faculty at the University of Toronto, St. George. I am a Faculty Associate at the Center for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute, Munk School, University of Toronto.
In 2018-19, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. https://www.facebook.com/krocinstitute/posts/10156332243510325

CV: My CV is available here

Research interests: I work on political violence and conflict in India, and do research on insurgencies in South Asia, particularly focusing on the Maoist insurgency in India. I also have an interest in state formation, legacies of colonial institutions, and other types of political violence in South Asia like the Kashmir insurgency and Hindu-Muslim violence and vigilantism. My research shows that historical legacies of state formation and land inequality matter to explain post-colonial insurgency and conflict, and urges the civil war scholarship to take history seriously.

Research area 1: Colonial legacies, historical institutions, and insurgency

The first strand of research focuses on colonial institutions and historical legacies they bequeath which create conditions for insurgency and civil war in post-colonial times. I specifically analyze effects of colonial indirect rule on the Maoist insurgency in India, but the broader research agenda is to focus more generally on different forms of colonial rule in South Asia and beyond and its effect on different forms of insurgency.

Within this area of research, I have published a book titled Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India, Cambridge University Press, Studies in Contentious Politics Series, 2021, which uses data gathered during field work, archival data and quantitative analysis of sub national datasets to demonstrate that colonial institutions of indirect rule selected by the British set up the structural conditions for post colonial insurgency through path dependent mechanisms. It develops a novel typology of different types of princely states and land tenure and shows how they created mechanisms of land inequality and weak state capacity that facilitated Maoist insurgency. It uses a mixed method research design and uses process tracing of historical legacies and its effects on Maoist insurgency in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, nested within an all India district level quantitative analysis.

I have also published an article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution which focuses on the quantitative testing of my theory on an all-India district level dataset using an Instrumental Variable (IV2SLS) analysis to address potential Selection Effects due to the British intentionally choosing poorer or areas with more rebellious tribes for indirect rule. This article won an Honorable Mention for the Mary Parker Follett Award from APSA’s Politics and History Section in 2019. I have also published on the effects of indirect rule through feudatory princely states in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India in World Development and on the colonial legacies of indirect rule on anti-immigrant sons of the soil insurgency in Asian Security.

Research area 2: Insurgency, conflict and counter insurgency in South Asia

I have started research on a second book project which asks why the Kashmir and Maoist insurgencies have declined in violence, but persisted at low intensity, while ethnic insurgencies in Punjab, Assam, Tripura, Nagaland and Maoist insurgency in Andhra Pradesh have seen an end to violence and return of peaceful electoral politics? A second related question is why are there different patterns of violence in recent phase of the persistent and low intensity Maoist and Kashmir insurgencies? This research is funded by a SSHRC-Insight Development Grant which will be used to develop a dataset on persistent insurgencies in India.

Within this area of research, I have published an article on how medium capacity states are willing to live with peripheral insurgencies as long as they do not escalate above a certain threshold leading to low intensity long duration insurgencies in Civil Wars. I have written two chapters on insurgency and counter insurgency in India in the Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security and Routledge Handbook of Asian Security Studies, and also written an article in Washington Post, Monkey Cage Blog on Kashmir insurgency.

Research area 3: Pre-colonial warfare, rebellions, and conflict

The third strand of research will focus on pre-colonial legacies of warfare and state formation, as well as pre-colonial origins of different types of princely states and land tenure systems and their long-term effects. This will continue my research on historical legacies but expand beyond my current focus on colonial indirect rule and land tenure institutions. Within this area of research, I have recently co-authored a paper with Dincecco, Fenske, and Menon titled “Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India” at The Economic Journal which focuses on the role of warfare in pre-colonial and colonial India, and whether this has any long-term effects on state and fiscal capacity, which persist and have an effect on levels of development and state capacity today. In this paper, we test Tilly’s thesis of ‘wars make states and states make war’ in the Indian context, which is a big gap in the literature on state formation in South Asia. A major empirical contribution is collection of a geo-coded dataset from various historical sources on battles and war in India to test for their long term effects.

Another working paper within this area of research is on “Varieties of indirect rule and insurgency in India,” which I have presented at APSA conference 2020. In this paper, I build on the typology of different types of princely states based on the pre-colonial origins of these states that I developed in my book manuscript, and extends this analysis to test how this typology of indirect rule can help explain other insurgencies in India in Punjab, Kashmir, and North East.

I am also have a working paper “Legacies of Maoist conflict on land reforms in India”, co-authored with Patricia Justino, that I have proposed for the Institutional Legacies of Violent Conflict, UNU-WIDER Working Paper Series, https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/institutional-legacies-violent-conflict. This paper contributes to new research that studies how institutions that develop during conflict have long term effects on state building, economic development and reforms. In this paper, I propose to study if areas under Maoist control in the 1940s and 1980s in the state of Andhra Pradesh resulted in land redistribution and development by the state.